+++
title = "English Language Pronouns"
date = 2022-07-07
+++

Disclaimer
==========

These ideas originate from previous conversations I have participated
in. And so, I do not claim to be the origin, inventor, etc. But since I
have not heard much on furthering this topic, I feel like it needs to
exist somewhere.

Some credit goes to the \"Human Rayla\" bit from the Dragon Prince for
the snowman/snowelf idea. And to Star Trek for pop culture references
used as normative baselines.

This post will likely infuriate folks on both the left and the right.

The state of pronouns
=====================

The last several years, introducing oneself such as, \"Hello, my name is
Alex Lee and my pronouns are they/them\" has become the norm in many
communities, if not a greater part of society.

To give some background, which might seem obvious for many of people,
the default address or reference does not always take the most general
term. Some people default to gendered pronouns, mainly \"he\" etc, when
referring to someone they only know on paper.

Classification is important for people in my field, but not exclusive to
it. That said, I have a particular interest in classification, casting,
types, etc. When someone says \"he went to the park\" I want to assume
that person has a known gender. Whatever the gender does not matter,
other than it being correct.

I am not going to get into why precision and accuracy are important for
scientists/engineers. But for computation, we usually refer to bad data
as garbage, and this analogy is not hyperbole.

In addition to classification, there is also state. I will explain the
projection of pronouns via a table in the next section.

Also, I don\'t plan on going over pejorative or non-anthropomorphic
\"it\". Maybe I\'ll discuss that another time.

What can improve
================

When someone introduces themselves, including their pronouns, the above
mentioned introduction only supplies the third-person pronouns (and also
sometimes determiners). We miss the opportunity to introduce ourselves
with a first-person pronoun. If we had such pronouns, Alex could
introduce themselves simply as \"Hello, my name is Alex Lee\". If
English had a full set of gendered pronouns, then the first-person
pronoun would imply the third-person.

I don\'t have good naming, so letting that go, this demonstrates how
this could work. Please note, this is not an exhaustive table and that
I\'ve used \"general\" for a catch-all case for non-introduced people or
for people who do not wish to use gendered language, even if they
perhaps identify with a specific gender.

  gender    first-person possessive determiner   third-person nominative pronoun
  --------- ------------------------------------ ---------------------------------
  man       myhe                                 he
  woman     myshe                                she
  general   my                                   they

So if someone who identifies as a man says, \"Hello myhe name is Biff\"
we can avoid the lengthy introduction of Biff saying \"he/him\". We only
need to do so if someone accepts multiple pronouns, such as if Biff felt
comforible with both he and they.

This table does not account for plural third person pronouns. Icelandic,
for example, has multiple gendered cognates for English they (in fact,
most etymology shows English borrowed they from Old Norse). Please note
that the neuter for þau does not have the same kinds of negative
connotations that the singular English \"it\" has, unless when the
speaker means it to be pejorative. And please note, this could change
and maybe it already has; the pandemic has certainly had a strain on my
friendships.

  gender   plural third-person nominative pronoun   Adjusted to Modern English characters
  -------- ---------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------
  man      þeir                                     their
  woman    þær                                      thaer
  neuter   þau                                      thau

These holes in the data aside, there is another aspect to the
pronouns/determiners that does not come up very often, at least in the
United States: titles. Some titles refer to class status, age,
achievement, marital status, but the two most common Mr and Ms only
necessarily refer to gender. We can assume people do not become confused
with Mr Data, the android who wants to become human. Data is not human,
but it makes perfect sense, so the title relates to gender not the
biological species or sex. Refer to also Pinocchio.

Will people be confused? \"Hello, my name is Dr Alex Lee\". No, they
will not be confused. What about everyone else? Japanese has a suffix
general title \"-san\". English could borrow that, and reorder it to
keep convention: \"Hello my name is San Alex Lee\".

We could use titles intead of filling in the holes in the
pronouns/determiners. It would require fewer changes, and we already
have done this before in English, somewhat recently with the migration
from general use of Miss/Mrs to Ms.

These are just proof of concept.

Additional thoughts
===================

I also suspect some good in reducing the use of the word \"man\" when
referring to male gendered people and certainly for people in general,
regardless of gender. I think I have mentioned this before. I think we
probably won\'t witness \"man\" go away any time soon, nor \"woman\" or
\"human\". But if we wanted to start using an alterative to \"man\" I
think we could just construct a new word using a male-type prefix. So we
could use \"karlman\". No one is going to argue that that word doesn\'t
sound manly to represent the gender.

On the other side of that, Icelandic should probably stop using the word
\"snjókarl\" for snowman. Snowhuman works, but not necessarily for Mr
Data or Mr Spock. I like snowfolk.
